Abstract
This paper analyzes how to choose a delegation, a committee to represent a society such as in a peace conference. We propose normative conditions and seek Pareto optimal, consistent, neutral, and non-manipulable ways to choose a delegation. We show that a class of threshold rules is characterized by these criteria. The rules do not choose a fixed number of delegates, but instead require different sizes of delegations, depending on the heterogeneity in society. Therefore the resulting delegations are very inclusive, and with t delegates the ratio of individuals whose opinions are not included is always below 
. For instance, a delegation of size two should have at least 75% support from the society and therefore only less than 25% of the opinion pool can be neglected.
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Burak Can: This work is mostly financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under the Grant with Project No. 451-13-017 (VENI, 2014) and partially by Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg. The support of both institutes, therefore, is gratefully acknowledged.
Péter Csóka was supported by the ÚNKP-16-4-III New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Capacities and by the Nemzeti Kutatási Fejlesztési és Innovációs Hivatal - NKFIH, K-120035.
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Can, B., Csóka, P. & Ergin, E. How to choose a fair delegation?. Econ Theory 72, 1339–1373 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-020-01312-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-020-01312-x
Keywords
- Aggregation rules
- Committee selection
- Conflict management
- Kemeny distance
- Strategy-proofness
JEL Classification
- C70
- D71